and requested that she fill it out for us. It’s a neat book asking for information about memories from childhood and adulthood, with prompts that help tell stories. My partner’s grandma had an interesting life, and we were hoping to capture some of that while she’s still around to tell us.

So she filled it out for us. She did gloss over some of the darker parts of her past… reading between the lines you can see that she was estranged from her parents very young, and got married to an older man as a teenager, but the why or how isn’t there. Only the happier stories. Apparently she eloped in a tiny private plane to a state with a younger age for marriage!

She gave us back her copy this summer. We took it to the local print shop and are having 8 copies made, one for each grandkid. Hardcover was going to cost something like $140/piece (seems overpriced compared to BigCity; there was a lot more competition in BigCity), but 8 copies in soft cover in black and white will only cost us $230 for the lot. The average cost over two years makes up for only spending $13 or so last year!

We will ship the 8 copies to her in time for Christmas, and hopefully she’ll give them out as presents.

And that’s our present to my partner’s grandma this year. I hope she likes it. Next year we’re out of ideas again.

Do you ever give gifts that require effort from the recipient? What’s on your list for folks this year?

That’s a great gift idea!! We only have one living grandmother left (my maternal grandmother), so it would be wonderful to do something like this.

I am making a digital scrapbook (using Blurb) of Evan’s first year, including some of my blog entries about him (mostly the monthly milestone ones, but some others as well). I will give a copy to both sets of parents and keep one for ourselves as well.

[…] backstage passes to enjoy with DC. My father got a bottle of fancy rum. Grandmother-in-law #2 we already talked about (MIL says she got her copy last week.) The other half of the blog is getting an assortment of […]